Just a few years ago Congress passed a bill, almost unanimously, granting Central American “yutes” hearings before judges in lieu of swift deportation. The objective was to solve a limited problem with sex trafficking. The misinterpretation of that statute has spawned the current crisis.

Now come the veterans, albeit with a real problem: bonuses for bureaucrats incentivizing murder. The answer to that problem is to smash the VA and enable veterans to buy their care in the marketplace. The answer from Congress is mostly a bigger VA, but only five House members had the stones to oppose it. (Via Drudge.)

Wednesday, 30 July 2014

Former senior IRS official Lois Lerner had deeply held political biases while she was in a position of authority, according to Republican lawmakers who unveiled emails on Wednesday showing her referring to conservatives as “crazies” and “a**holes.”

Charles Krauthammer had it exactly right last night on Special Report. Dems are ginning up impeachment talk for two reasons. First, it allows them to fundraise. Second, it induced the hapless John Boehner to deny impeachment is on the table weeks before Obama launches a clearly impeachable amnesty edict. (Via Drudge.)

Tuesday, 29 July 2014

George Will said we should welcome the harmless illegal children. Not so much:

He referred sarcastically to “eight-year-old criminals with their teddy bears​,” having swallowed the Democratic/MSM line that the “unaccompanied minors” are mainly young children. In fact, 84 percent of unaccompanied minors apprehended so far this fiscal year are teenagers. Half the total are 15-17-year-old boys. In fact, it’s certain that some non-trivial share aren’t minors at all, having lied about their age. How many of them have teddy bears?

Will again: “We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America. You’re going to go to school, get a job, and become Americans.’” Implicit here is that these are abandoned juveniles, wards of the state, whom we must take under our wing. This will come as a surprise to their families. In fact, through June, 96 percent of those transferred by immigration authorities to the Department of Health and Human Services have been released to sponsors in the U.S., the majority of them the juveniles’ parents (most of the rest almost certainly other family members).

Nor is “unaccompanied” even correct. As a Salvadoran smuggler recently told a paper in his country: “It makes me laugh when the media talk about the children traveling alone. No one goes alone. The smugglers take them all.”

And that doesn’t even account for the fact that at least half of the minors apprehended by the Border Patrol aren’t even pretending to be traveling alone — they’re traveling with their families.

Will then shows his arithmetic prowess to demonstrate that the yoke is easy and the burden light: “We have 3,141 counties in this country. That’d be 20 per county,” referring to the 57,000 “unaccompanied” “minors” apprehended so far this year. First, there’s the obvious fact that virtually all will settle in a handful of populous metro areas (Loving County, Texas has 82 people — will they be taking 20 too?). More importantly, what makes Will think the 57,000 are the end of the story? Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are home to 12 million people under 18 — can they all come? If not, why not? There are close to 3 billion people in the world living in countries with lower per capita GDPs than Honduras — can they come too? My colleague Jerry Kammer points to Deng Xiaoping’s response when Jimmy Carter offered similar sentimentalist foolishness: ”Fine. How many do you want? Ten million?”

Monday, 28 July 2014

There was one critical aspect of the border swarm I hadn’t seen covered by the media. And now it has been:

Cabrera also confirmed to Stockman an earlier WND story revealing no biometric identification measures are taken on illegal immigrant minors detained at the border, not even fingerprints, allowing them to easily be lost within the U.S. once processed.

Take a DNA sample and it would be easy to identify them when they pop up again in the future. This is proof positive that Obambi doesn’t want to enforce the law. (Via Drudge.)

Saturday, 26 July 2014

Months before Gilead Sciences’ breakthrough hepatitis C treatment hit the market, Oregon Medicaid official Tom Burns started worrying about how the state could afford to cover every enrollee infected with the disease. He figured the cost might even reach $36,000 per patient.

Then the price for the drug was released last December: $84,000 for a 12-week treatment course.

At that price, the state would have to spend $360 million to provide its Medicaid beneficiaries with the drug called Sovaldi, just slightly less than the $377 million the Oregon Medicaid program spent on all prescription drugs for about 600,000 members in 2013. It potentially would be a backbreaker.

Faced with those steep costs, Oregon and several other states are looking to limit who has access to the drug that nearly everyone acknowledges is a revolutionary treatment for the disease affecting more than 3 million Americans.

Expensive specialty drugs aren’t new to health care. But Sovaldi stands out because it is aimed at helping millions of Americans who carry hepatitis C, and a large share of those infected are low-income and qualify for government coverage.

Hmmm, how is this plague being spread among America’s poor? The Washington Post makes a back-handed admission:

Hepatitis C, which is most commonly spread through needles, can lead to chronic liver disease, cirrhosis or liver cancer if left untreated.

Needles, as in illegal users of intravenous drugs (mostly) and tattoo recipients (often). And taxpayers will be forced at the point of a gun to subsidize these choices. Of course, they already do:

The treatment also allows patients to avoid expensive hospitalizations and liver transplants, which on average cost $577,000.